


Vastly Improved by Revisions

by Morbane



Category: Dark City (1998), Stranger Than Fiction (2006)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Crack, Constructive Criticism Welcome, Crossover, Gen, Meta, Present Tense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-10
Updated: 2012-09-10
Packaged: 2017-11-13 22:35:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/508460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A power greater than her is trying to convince Karen Eiffel, novelist, that she is actually Karen Eiffel, serial murderess. However, Karen Eiffel is a professional, and there's no way she will allow anyone to write her into a corner and take her stories away.</p>
<p>(Or: Strangers & Fiction)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vastly Improved by Revisions

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kurushi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kurushi/gifts).



> Thanks to Three_Headed_Monkey for checking over this!

This story is different.

For one thing, it's taken Karen ten years to write so far. Every time she's baulked at the ending, she's gone back and polished a detail: Harold in the week before his final accounting exams, or Ana's grandmother teaching her how to make croissants, or Dave's reaction when Harold buys his guitar. As the fans continue to write, to ask her about her life and inspiration, she is living in Harold's life, in the world of a man who has no such inspiration. No thoughts yammering in his head, pushing him in a million directions. (Until.)

For another, it brings her into prolonged contact with a real live human being. Someone with a disagreeably _legitimate_ reason to knock on the door at nine in the morning, although, thank goodness, Penny never brings flowers, books to sign, or a microphone.

She wants to say, "Go away – I'm going to be Harold Crick's writer for the rest of my life," but there's the deal with Edison Publishing Company, and even if there weren't, she's not quite as flighty as Penny seems to think. She knows she has a responsibility to herself as a writer to finish this story and move on.

Only then the phone rings, and she realises that this story is different because it has, not researchers and characters, but accomplices and victims.

Harold Crick, her character, has a life in the same existence as she does, and she is pulling his strings. When she processes this: "I've killed eight people," she says dramatically.

A day later, Penny points out the flaw in this argument.

"Premise one," she says, "Your books are world-famous."

"Next," says Karen sharply, talked into a corner, because anything else will sound like fishing for compliments.

"Premise two," Penny says. "The characters in your books live and die in the real world."

"Ye-es," says Karen, trying not to think about it, and instead suddenly offended by the idea of real, opinionated wristwatches. How unmagical, if she hasn't imagined them.

"No one's ever sued you for writing about the death of their mother," says Penny. "No one's ever recognised their teacher or dentist or civil engineer. This has never intersected with your life before. Why should it now?"

Karen experiences revelation. This is true. Harold Crick is an anomaly. Something is new here. Something is _inconsistent_.

Her wonderment is exactly the same sensation as she felt when realising that Moira, the teacher protagonist of her sixth novel, had a six-year-old daughter. Lucy was going to spend the most fateful school holidays of all with her father, who no longer lived with Moira. How hard it was for Moira to let her beloved Lucy go, even for a little while, even to someone who loved her: and the story coalesced into an expression of how such quotidian battles can hide and reveal the largest ones, with life itself, like trees obscuring the forest. As Karen had realised this about Lucy and Moira, Karen's plot had clicked into place, and so had Moira's death.

_Hold that thought_ , says part of her, because Penny has begun to speak again, answering her own question.

"Actually," Penny says now, "When I was going through your files from Gauss, there were some very cryptic notes. Originally, I thought you wrote them. They certainly go with your reputation. But now I know they aren't your handwriting."

_Except what Penny actually says is_ , "When I was going through your files from Edison, I found notes about censored fanmail and legal consultations. They were... mysterious. I thought you'd written them. But you hadn’t, had you?"

Much more tactful. More like Penny. Also so vague that it could mean anything it needs to. Karen’s a professional: she knows how clues work.

It's a plot hole. She's watching a plot hole open and close. She's watching the moving finger write. Someone is writing her life, and she hasn't killed anyone yet, but they're trying to convince her that she has.

_I haven't killed anyone yet_ , Karen thinks, _and these are not my memories_ , even as her mouth opens and she says, "My last editor was so insistent that I change the name of the civil engineer." _Damn it_.

"You don't read the paper much, do you," says Penny, further establishing the dissociation between Karen Eiffel and the world, and although it's a fair conclusion to draw from her recluse habits and disregard for other people's activities, it's not true.

“I need to make some notes,” Karen says, and reaches for her typewriter. She is hypothesising at lightning speed that it is her ally in the same way Harold’s watch is his.

There is a sheet of fresh white paper in the machine (because the part in which _The phone rings_ several times is now part of a bundle Harold is carrying right now in his hands, away from Jules Hilbert’s office, looking emotionally crushed, train-wrecked, or shot to hell – _oh, shut up, brain_ ).

Instead of writing Harold’s present moments, Karen writes, _I am a character in my own story. Someone wants to make me think that I kill people by writing about their deaths. Possibly I even bring them into existence. But I don’t believe this. I think I’m being manipulated._ She feels a lot better about having this written down. She doesn’t feel particularly good about having declared herself fictional. It may have been the wrong move. It may not lend her a lot of agency.

A day ago, Harold Crick stood in front of her, pleading for his life. Well, he’s not a writer. He doesn’t know how stories should go. How would a professional handle this?

As she thinks about Harold, she can see him on a bus, flicking through pages. She has given him a front seat at his own funeral. It’s as if she’s turned him into a secret spy, someone who fakes his own death. Hm. Faking his death is one possibility.

Realising that her own privacy is an illusion makes her feel a little better about conjuring up the scene which Harold has just left: the interview with Jules Hilbert.

“Harold, I’m sorry,” says Jules Hilbert. “You have to die. It’s her masterpiece.” And then he stops, and offers no further explanation or consolation.

_Wait, what?_

Karen is not the most rational person she knows, and that’s quite aside from imagining leaping off buildings.

Case in point: Penny, whom Karen is currently casting in a role of “unwitting murderess enabler”, had quite a sharp conversation with her after Harold left, about how vicious she is to her characters because she won’t kill herself. Penny, Karen thinks, is missing the point in a rather large way. Karen also writes about people like Ana Pascal, and every life that Ana Pascal has touched: every fellow student who ate her cookies, everyone who talked about Trotsky with her and felt hopeful rather than doomed about the world.

Karen doesn’t live in that kind of warmth, and she takes a certain grim satisfaction when her characters take it, mistakenly, for granted. So she’s not kind and possibly not sane.

But nothing could make her tell Harold Crick to his face that he must die in the name of art. 

Karen needs to talk to Jules Hilbert.

Karen wishes her typewriter were a little more portable. 

Karen arrives just around midnight.

She has borrowed Harold’s watch.

“Hello, self-insert,” she says. “Or should I call you the Narrator?”

The smiling, poised face of a literature theory professor seems to empty out in front of her, the skin becoming pale and baggy, the eyes sinking back, the lips losing colour. It is terrifying. Karen glances down involuntarily and sees that Harold’s watch has stopped, which perhaps explains Jules’s condition. Humans are not meant to be taken out of time.

“Are you impressed?” asks someone from within the professor’s body.

“Yes,” says Karen grudgingly. “What should I call you?”

“Mr Script will do,” says the someone, gloatingly.

Karen nods. Self-flattery, but you have to sometimes. She has deduced something correctly.

“And where do you think this is going?” she asks. “Harold dies, and then – what? The audience mourns? What kind of story is this?”

“A Mephistophelian one,” replies Mr Script smugly. “You, the author, struck a deal with the devil for fame and fortune. The cost is that your characters are real and die accordingly, and when you learn of this, and continue regardless, you lose your soul.”

“Nine lives, very tidy,” says Karen. “Don’t tell me that’s the title.”

She has meant to feign disdain, but it comes easily. So _shallow_. She is a better writer than this nihilistic force in front of her. People don’t need devils _ex machina_ in order to surrender integrity. When Harold was standing in front of her, she had caught herself thinking that instead of having one option, she had an actual _dilemma_.

“Don’t you think that’s a little depressing?” she says. “I die, we all die, the creator is punished for attempting to control creation, fame means you’re shallow, blah blah blah blah.”

Mr Script sniffs, offended. Oops.

“Also, you’re an omnipotent writer with a story about an omnipotent writer who gets punished.”

Mr Script winces. Better.

“I think,” Karen says, now that this _projection_ of a person is paying attention, “there’s more to the story than this.” And she sketches it out: a happy ending that’s only possible when a story doesn’t end. She lays out a few commercially viable angles and loose ends that are interesting and steers Mr Script away from gothic gloom.

And Harold Crick accepts his fate, which is nice of him but unnecessary, and doesn’t die, and Karen decides to have a word with him afterwards.

“There’s something critics say about my work,” she says, which is a sentence no self-respecting author should be forced to utter, except with ulterior motives. “I kill characters off at the height of their happiness. What do you think that means, Harold?”

He works it out. He sees that he will never be as heroic again, as content with Ana – the shine will come off that relationship, he’ll never be as fulfilled as an auditor now that he’s living his life more fully; what goes up must come down. Like an apple.

“I’ve… had my moment?” he says. She sees how daunted he is.

“ _Wrong_ ,” says Karen. “Or, rather, prove me wrong. Keep being happy. If you ever find yourself thinking _I’ll never be this happy again_ then you are _taking a big risk_ that dramatic irony won’t get you. Looking forward to the rest of your life is your _job_ , Harold, and it probably sounds easy, but it won’t always be! Do you understand me?”

He nods, wide-eyed, alarmed. She gives him a conspiratorial wink, shakes his hand, and leaves.

The world is re-written: Jules Hilbert and Penny and Karen all have hearts, and souls, and her own authorial authority has escaped definition.

Mr Script may regret that last part. She hasn’t decided yet.


End file.
